Standard theft policies may cap out far below the replacement value of library and pre-shipment stock.
Seven masked thieves stole around 30,000 bottles of premium wine worth about €5 million ($5.8 million) from a Marchesi Antinori logistics warehouse in Cortona, Tuscany, last Saturday night, in what the producer describes as the largest wine theft on record in Italy. The company's alarm system had been deactivated the day before, from inside the building, and Antinori says it suspects an inside job.
Every bottle taken was from the 2023 vintage: roughly 10,000 bottles each of Solaia, Tignanello and Guado al Tasso, the estate's flagship Super Tuscans. The wines retail internationally for between €150 and €500 a bottle. Between 60,000 and 70,000 bottles of Solaia are produced each year, so the thieves removed roughly a seventh of a full vintage of one of Italy's most allocated labels. Staff discovered the theft on Monday morning when they arrived at the warehouse. No arrests have been made, and police and Carabinieri are investigating.
Alarms off, forklifts ready, export pallets waiting
The operational details are what should alarm the trade. Surveillance footage showed the gang entering the Cortona storage facility and disabling its alarm systems before loading thousands of cases onto two trucks, a process that took roughly three hours. They used the company's own forklifts.
An Antinori press official told The Times: "The alarm had already been deactivated on Friday." The official added: "It was switched off internally, which makes us suspect somebody on the inside was working with the thieves."
The timing compounded the exposure. The wines had been palletized and boxed for a major export shipment to distributors, with Reuters reporting that this preparation allowed the thieves to remove a large quantity of high-value bottles quickly. Antinori told The Times that such large export shipments are organized only once or twice a year, which means the gang struck during a narrow, predictable window when maximum value was sitting in one place, ready to move.
Chief executive Renzo Cotarella said the precision of the target selection pointed to professionals. "These were people who knew what they were doing," he told The Times. "They weren't simply thieves who had no idea what they were stealing."
The insurance will not cover it
For winery owners and CFOs, the sharpest line in this story is financial. Antinori's theft insurance does not fully cover a loss of this magnitude, and Cotarella confirmed to The Times that the company could not recover the value through its policy.
There is precedent, and it is discouraging. In 2014, thieves broke into the Marsala winery of Donnafugata in Sicily and stole 15,000 bottles worth €150,000 after the alarm was deactivated. Police later determined that a surveillance officer assigned to monitor the winery had colluded with the gang. Donnafugata was unable to claim on its insurance, and although some of the wine was eventually recovered, it had to be destroyed because it had been stored in unsuitable summer warehouses.
The lesson for producers: standard theft policies may cap out far below the replacement value of library and pre-shipment stock, and recovered wine is often commercially worthless anyway. Coverage limits, sublimits on stock in transit or awaiting shipment, and the insurability of insider-enabled theft deserve a line-by-line review at the next renewal.
Three thefts in succession
Antinori is not an isolated case. In July, Castello Banfi reported that 3,300 bottles of its best Alta Langa wine were stolen from its Piedmont cellar, with the thieves selecting bottles with great care. Last month, around 3,000 bottles of Barolo worth €300,000 to €400,000 were taken from Conterno Fantino in Monforte d'Alba, also in Piedmont. Cotarella said the same gang may be behind the recent robberies.
"Three thefts have occurred in succession," Alessandro Regoli, the editor of the Italian wine website WineNews, told The Times, calling the Antinori heist "one of the biggest wine thefts in history."
The pattern suggests organized groups are now casing Italian wineries the way they once cased jewelry stores: targeting bottling and pre-shipment windows, defeating alarms from the inside, and moving volume fast. What used to be opportunistic pilfering of a few high-value bottles from restaurants and cellars has scaled into industrial logistics crime.
What the trade should do now
Antinori has alerted customers in 170 countries to be wary of offers outside official sales channels, and is urging anyone offered these wines by unknown sellers to report it. Every stolen bottle carries an individual serial and QR code, which gives distributors and retailers a verification tool: check the codes, and treat any 2023 Solaia, Tignanello or Guado al Tasso arriving through unofficial channels as suspect.
Beyond this case, producers and logistics managers should treat the Antinori playbook as a threat model. Audit who can deactivate alarm and camera systems, and when; log every deactivation. Review insider access to shipment schedules, since the gang clearly knew when export pallets would be staged. Reconsider concentrating a full export allocation in a single facility during the one or two annual shipment windows. And confirm with brokers, in writing, what a theft of finished goods awaiting export actually pays.
Cotarella remains hopeful the wine will surface. "Two trucks cannot just disappear," he told CNN. "I remain always positive." For the rest of the industry, hope is not a control. The controls are access logs, coverage reviews, and a distribution network trained to spot stolen stock.